A Research Workshop with Jonathan Alexander, Juli Carson, Ashley Hunt, and Mark Minch-de Leon. Organized and facilitated by Annika Haas.
Collapsing climates — cultural, political, and meteorological — have become a shared, yet unevenly experienced condition of the contemporary poly-crisis. Deconstructive approaches to humans’ effect on the Earth’s ecosystem such as Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene, underscore the close links between collapsing climates and the ideological paradigms that powerfully impact our capacities to survive — or live critically within it. Yet the experience of collapse, as both material and affective conditions of life on this planet, remains a question of positionality. Related injustices are mounting among different geopolitical and climatic regions, within their stratified societies and irreparably damaged ecologies.
The workshop focuses on cultures of knowing which are equally affected by collapsing climates. This concerns the struggle for evidence and testimony, the reality of epistemicides alongside the expansion of computational, neocolonial information infrastructures, as well as the difficulties to engage with various embodied, ancestral and relational ways of knowing (through) damage and pain as well as destruction, disaster and death in the context of the Westernized university.
The workshop also confronts persistent ideas that dominate the anticipated horizon of collapse and its imaginary counterparts — such as repair, wholeness, restoration and reproduction, archival preservation, technological solutionism, securitization and straightness — with the experience of unknowing, discomfort and failure that surround what Jack Halberstam terms as the "gritty, dirty, messy, disorderly” unworld to come. This unworld becomes tangible not despite, but through collapse and its diverse temporal, epistemic as well as affective layers encompassing disappointment, delusion, dissociation as well as despair. Engaging with these layers and their aftermaths, the workshop explores possibilities and forms of imagining an otherwise that may point towards ways of “living and thinking and feeling otherwise, through the brokenness."
Organized in parallel with the exhibition The Unworld To Come. Imagining an Otherwise…, on view at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery through April 4, 2026, this workshop engages the artworks by Marwa Arsanios, Virgil B/G Taylor, Ashley Hunt, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian as a point of departure for collective inquiry. Structured through joint writing exercises, shared research, and conversation, the workshop convenes participants to think through collapse as a lived, uneven, and contested reality that shapes how knowledge is produced, felt, and withheld.